A large-scale choral-band piece in the Copland-Bernstein mold.

This is a live recording of the world premiere performance of this work that took place in April, 1996 and as such there is some noise and a few rough spots, but this is music of the highest order that is well worth hearing. Mr. Maslanka calls his new composition Mass, a setting of the Latin Ordinary including Hymn to Sophia, Holy Wisdom by Richard Beale. This is a very serious piece of music in a vein similar to Britten's War Requiem. Maslanka writes: "Almost from the start of my thinking about the Mass, I was moved to include the female creative or the Holy Mother, an image that has arisen in many forms in my meditative life. I asked my friend Richard Beale to consider the problem. His marvelous and almost instantaneous response was "Hymn to Sophia, Holy Wisdom," a set of seven poems on the Holy Mother theme, that I have used in my setting of the Mass as preludes to the Latin texts." As you can see from the forces listed that are needed to perform this Mass, it is a huge work. The recording itself captures beautifully the sheer magnitude of the sound of this music.